The Night Strangers (17 page)

“You only think so because you are some strange exception to the rule. Trust me: When I’m with her, I spend most of my time pushing all compromising or catty thoughts as far from my mind as possible.”

“I can’t believe you have thoughts that are catty.”

Clary smiled. “But you do believe I have ones that are compromising?”

“Of course,” said Anise, and she squeezed past her friend on the way to the walk-in pantry filled with the raw materials for her cooking and tinctures: her powders and seeds and dried leaves. “You’re married to a lawyer.”

O
n Sunday night, Emily leaned back against the gleaming steel and marble cooking island in Reseda’s kitchen and inhaled deeply the aroma of rosemary and lamb from the oven and the scent of the beeswax candles that seemed to be alight everywhere. It was a wonder the woman had found the counter space to cook. Emily knew she was a little tipsy—maybe even more than a little—but she didn’t care. It felt good to relax and let down her guard a bit. She was drinking some sort of hard, mulled cider and it was like candy. The twins were watching movies on the other side of the house in the den while the rest of the adults were in the sunroom that was attached to this two-hundred-year-old Colonial like an architectural afterthought. In addition to Chip and her, Reseda had invited Holly and a young man with a silver loop in his eyebrow who seemed to be Holly’s boyfriend, and the Jacksons—an older couple whose attitude toward her daughters was eerily reminiscent of the way Clary Hardin and Sage Messner had hovered over the twins just last night. Emily had joined Reseda when the hostess came to the kitchen to check on the lamb and toss the potatoes that were roasting on a rack below the meat, offering to help but really hoping only to get away from the Jacksons for a moment.

As soon as she and Chip had arrived at Reseda’s, she had known who this older couple was. She wasn’t sure how because she had never met them. (She hadn’t returned to the Jacksons’ to get the bean sprouts and carrot tops for the girls’ class science project, because Ginger had taken the initiative and brought them to the school.) But, even before Ginger Jackson had opened her mouth, Emily had had a feeling that she was going to recognize the slightly throaty rasp that marked the woman’s voice from the answering machine. She pegged the woman to be in her late sixties and her husband, Alexander, to be in his early seventies. She thought she had seen him somewhere before but couldn’t pinpoint where or when. Then it clicked: He was the fellow that odd Becky Davis had nearly bowled over the day she raced out of the diner in Littleton. Alexander was tall and powerfully built and, despite his age, could pull off a completely shaved head. His shoulders seemed to be pressing hard against his turtleneck and navy blue blazer. Ginger wore her hair very much like Anise: It was a free-flowing silver mane that cascaded a long way down her back and looked a little wild. She was wearing a peasant skirt that fell to her ankles and rimless eyeglasses with lenses that didn’t look much bigger than pennies and seemed to be levitating just over her nose. The two of them, Alexander and Ginger, had been at least as smothering with her twins as the Hardins and the Messners had been on Saturday night. They had been so invasive of Hallie’s and Garnet’s personal space—what their third-grade teacher back in West Chester had called an individual’s bubble—that Garnet had actually backed away from Ginger and sat down on the plush easy chair beside Emily. For a moment, Emily had thought that her daughter was going to crawl into her lap. Then, when the twins had finally been allowed to leave the grown-ups, Ginger had started in on Emily. And she had started in with an eagerness that was downright relentless. She wanted to know whether Emily had ever gardened and what her plans were for her own greenhouse. She offered to come in with seedlings and starters for the makings of an Italian herb garden, as well as what she called the basics of a tincture patch. She said it didn’t have to be exotic at first, but—she assured Emily—it would be soon enough. She admitted that her own greenhouse lacked the powerfully healing aura of Reseda’s, though Emily had seen Reseda’s that evening, and she honestly wasn’t sure what was healing about a greenhouse filled with statues that were either frightening or freakish: A two-headed snake of some kind? A demonic-looking creature that was half man and half goat? A gargoyle clutching tiny humans who seemed to have great, leafy ivy where they should have had hands and feet? Then Ginger had gone on and on about the meadows around her house, comparing it favorably to the home in New Jersey where she and her husband had raised their sons, describing with a naturalist’s skill the occasional deer or moose that would wander along the edge of the woods here in Bethel. At one point, Ginger had pulled a compact from the pocket of her jumper and dabbed a watery cream at the edges of Emily’s eyes. “I make this myself,” she told Emily. “Makes those crow’s-feet disappear.” Emily had immediately noted Ginger’s surprisingly unlined face but still presumed the secret was Botox or a spectacularly gifted cosmetic surgeon—or, perhaps, both. When Reseda had risen, Emily had fled with her to the kitchen. Reseda seemed to understand that Ginger’s enthusiasm had crossed the rather substantial line between animated and rabid.

“She means well,” Reseda was saying, referring to Ginger Jackson. “I hope it wasn’t a mistake inviting her.”

“No, it’s fine,” Emily said. Reseda was wearing a perfectly pressed white button-down blouse, open at the neck just enough to show a hint of the lace on her bra, a black leather skirt that fell to her knees, and charcoal tights. Like Emily, she was not wearing shoes, but otherwise Emily felt underdressed beside her; she was wearing jeans, wool socks, and a blue and green Fair Isle sweater. It was a Sunday night and she had dressed casually. “But it is nice to catch my breath,” she continued. “She does have her share of very strong opinions. And she is very, very passionate about her gardening and tinctures and creams. But you all are, aren’t you?”

Reseda smiled but didn’t respond to the question. Instead she said with sisterly camaraderie, “I’ll see if I can discreetly seat you and Ginger at opposite ends of the table.”

“Or in opposite rooms, perhaps.”

Reseda nodded. “Chip seems a little better,” she observed.

“A little. But PTSD isn’t a cold. Depression isn’t a cold. It’s going to take time.” She thought again of the way he had razed that door in the basement and then how she had found him down there in the middle of the night sixteen or seventeen hours ago. She didn’t believe for a moment that he was checking the pilot light.

Reseda slid the roasted potatoes back into the oven and shut the door. “I think we’re just about there,” she murmured and then turned her attention back to Emily. “His name is Baphomet.”

“What is?”

“The creature in the fountain in my greenhouse. I rather like him.”

Emily gazed down at her drink. Had she mentioned aloud the greenhouse just now? She didn’t believe that she had.

“I bought him in a moment of minor anarchism. I knew what people were saying about me, and I thought I would really give them something to talk about.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Some people think he’s the devil.”

“Baphomet.”

“Yes.”

“And people think you do … what? Worship the devil? They think you’re a—what’s the word?—a Satanist?”

“Or Wiccan. But, I assure you, I’m neither.”

“John said you’re a shaman.”

“I’m not sure John knows what that means.”

“But you are something.”

Reseda sipped her mulled cider and seemed to be contemplating her answer, as if she weren’t precisely sure herself. Emily was struck by the woman’s eyes, which, in the candlelight in the kitchen, looked almost black. Weren’t they usually blue? Her lipstick was the color of a ripe fig, and her face was shaped like a heart. Emily realized that she wanted to kiss her, which struck her as odd because she hadn’t kissed a girl since she and a friend experimented at a sleepover in ninth grade. But she and Chip rarely made love now. Perhaps that explained her desire. Between his catatonia, her exhaustion, raising the girls, and the logistics of the move, she guessed that they had had sex perhaps a half dozen times since August 11 (and not once since moving to New Hampshire), and each event had been a rather rote affair. It had felt to her—and, she presumed, to him—like they were going through the motions because they were supposed to. They were married, they were in love; they were supposed to have sex. Before the crash, they had always had a rather interesting sex life, fueled by the three- and four-day absences that marked what he did for a living. Alas, romance, it seemed, was another casualty of Flight 1611.

“When I was a teenager, something happened to my sister and me,” Reseda said finally, stepping over to Emily so that Emily felt her lower back pressed against the counter. Reseda placed her cider on the marble. “It was violent and horrifying. But I learned something very interesting. Someday I’ll tell you.”

“But not tonight, I gather,” Emily said. She found it difficult to speak with Reseda so close, and her voice was barely above a whisper.

“No. Not tonight.”

The woman was standing right in front of her now, and suddenly all Emily could smell was the unrecognizable but absolutely heavenly scent of her perfume—the aroma of the lamb and the rosemary and the candles seemed to have vanished completely—and then the woman was closing her eyes and leaning into her, and pressing those lips the color of figs against hers. Emily was startled, but she closed her eyes, too, and accepted the woman’s warm tongue as it explored first her lips and then burrowed gently between them and started teasing the inside of her mouth. She felt Reseda’s hand reaching between her legs and massaging her firmly through her jeans; almost involuntarily she started to move her hips, to grind against the woman’s fingers.

And then Reseda was pulling away, her eyes open, smiling in a vague, absentminded sort of way. “Sweet,” she said softly, and she turned and took a pair of pot holders off the counter and went to remove the lamb from the oven. “This looks perfect,” she said.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Emily said, embarrassed, the words catching in her throat, but already Reseda was placing the great yellow pan with the meat on an ivy-shaped trivet and bringing one long, slender finger to her lips. In the kitchen doorway Emily heard her husband and Alexander Jackson, the two of them laughing about something, and Reseda said to the pair, “Ah, men. Lovely. Could one of you start pouring the wine in the dining room? We’re just about ready.”

H
ours later, Emily woke up in the night when she felt Chip’s hands on her rear. She had been asleep on her side, and he had pulled her nightgown up and over her waist, and now his fingers were sliding down the crevice and rubbing her. She felt his erection against her thigh, and her mind moved between images of Reseda’s closed eyes and the taste of her tongue and the feel of her husband hard against her leg. When his finger entered her, she was shocked at how wet she was. She pressed her ass against him and heard herself purring ever so slightly. She couldn’t recall the last time she and Chip had made love in the middle of the night. No, wait, she could. It had been four and a half years ago, when he had gotten home from a deadhead leg at two or two-thirty in the morning after four days away. She started to recall the details, but now Chip was rolling her onto her back and all she was aware of was the feel of his mouth on her breasts and the way he was raising himself above her—she reached up and grabbed at the sides of his chest, her fingers pressing against his ribs—and entering her. She moaned and rolled her head back against the pillow.

In the morning, while preparing the girls’ breakfast with Chip, she tried to make sense of Reseda’s kiss and the reality that she and her husband had finally christened their bedroom in New Hampshire—and how, for the first time in well over half a year, the sex had left her satisfied. It wasn’t a coincidence, this she knew. There was a connection. But for the life of her she couldn’t decide what it meant.

Chapter Eight

T
he house always seems a little more peculiar to you when the girls are at school and Emily is at work. When you’re alone. It’s as if it suspects that this is when you’re the most receptive. Or, perhaps, the most vulnerable.

It
.

One day you stood on your driveway and just stared at it. The windows were eyes, the long screened porch a mouth. It watched you back.

You know the air moves in currents along the hallways like breath, especially in that back stairway to the second floor and the thin corridor along the third floor. One day you came across Desdemona cowering in the living room, her orange body a small ball between the radiator and the corner where the wall angled into the bay window. She was quivering, her fur fluffed and her eyes wide. For the only time ever she hissed at you.

And then there was the time you found her with her collar caught on the pineapple finial on the banister to the front staircase. She was trying and failing to extricate herself and growing panicked. She was hanging herself, choking to death because for some reason the breakaway collar hadn’t unclasped. If you hadn’t wandered into the hallway at that very moment, in all likelihood the animal would have died.

In the end, you didn’t tell Emily about this because you know it would have upset her. There is actually a great deal you are shielding her from.

You realize, of course, that you are giving life to slate and clapboard and horsehair plaster. To bad wallpaper and a door in the basement. There is no
it
. But there is something. There are people. You know what you have found and you know what you have hidden in newspapers in the back of your armoire.

She deserves friends
.

It’s Monday, the start of a workweek for Emily and a school week for your girls, and once more you are here all alone. You tell yourself it wasn’t a bad weekend, despite your encounter with Ethan Stearns and Sandra Durant from Flight 1611 in the small hours of Sunday morning. After all, you spent time with the living, too. You got to know Emily’s boss a little better on Saturday night; you had a nice evening at Reseda’s on Sunday. Both parties were actually rather pleasant, and you made new friends. Moreover, when you awoke hours before sunrise today, you and Emily made love with an ardor you hadn’t felt in months.

So, you tell yourself, in many ways you are managing just fine. For a long moment you sit in a ladder-back chair and stare at the grotesque sunflowers on the dining room walls. These are not the cheerful Tuscan sunflowers of August. They are the dying blossoms of September, brown not merely because the wallpaper is antique. Even brand-new this paper may have been morbid.

The plan today is to continue stripping that god-awful wallpaper. In the past—in this house and in West Chester—you always scraped the old wallpaper off all of the walls before starting to hang the new paper. That is the logical way to proceed. But not this time. The other day you grew so bored with scraping that you started hanging the new paper, a serene (and appropriate) Victorian array of roses, on the wall on which you had removed all the old paper. You expect you will finish scraping today. You have one long wall and a small portion of another to go. Then you will have only one set of sponges and buckets to contend with and one set of tools.

Tools
. You gaze for a moment at the sponges and scrapers and box cutters and pause on the word. Each tool has a purpose.

As did that ax that was left for you. It was meant to batter down that door in the basement.

And that would suggest that the crowbar and the pearl-handled knife have specific functions, too. They’ve been provided to you for a reason. Unfortunately, you see only the barest wisps of that reason; it stretches away from you like the delicate, silken threads of cirrus you gazed upon too many times to count from the flight deck.

You have just steeled yourself to begin scraping for the day when you breathe in through your nose and there it is: the aroma of lake water and jet fuel. (The smell of the jet fuel actually makes you a little nauseous. This is new. You find this reality disconcerting.) You turn, and there on the dining room rug is little Ashley with her Dora the Explorer backpack, sitting with her legs curled up on the carpet underneath her. She looks at you with her big eyes and her damp hair, and you study her wet face. It’s not all lake water that is on her cheeks, you realize. You know from the redness of her eyes that she is crying, and her cheeks are moist with her tears.

And so you sit on the floor beside her, your own knees a little creaky.

“Hello, Ashley.”

She sniffles and folds herself around that backpack. She looks down, and you can no longer see her eyes and her face, just the way her sodden hair is plastered to the top of her head.

“Why are you crying, sweetie?”

The second the words are out there, you regret the question. Why wouldn’t she be crying? She simply shakes her head obstinately and ignores your inquiry. Which is when the more practical question comes to you.

“Sweetie,” you begin, and the second time you use this particular term of endearment, it dawns on you that this is a name you use often with Hallie and Garnet. “Is there something I can do?”

She deserves friends. Do what it takes
.

Again, she offers you only a sad, stubborn twist of her head.

“Are you lonely?”

Slowly she meets your eyes. She nods almost imperceptibly. You recall your conversation with her father: You had offered to introduce this poor child to your own wonderful girls. You need to follow through with that idea of yours. You need to find Ashley playmates. This is something tangible you can do.

“I know you’ve seen Hallie and Garnet,” you tell her, and you reach behind you for the roll of paper towels on the floor. You hand one to the girl so she can blow her nose and wipe her eyes. “How do I introduce you to them? Any idea there?”

She presses the paper towel flat against her face for a moment and chokes back a small sob. Then she pulls it away and looks more composed. “I don’t know,” she says.

“Tell me: Have my girls seen you?”

“Sort of. But not really.”

“Not really?”

“I don’t think they can.”

“Why?”

“They’re breathers.”

“Breathers?”

“You know. Like you.”

“But I can see you. I can hear you.”

She shrugs.

“Well, then,” you say in your most gentle, paternal voice. “We have a problem. And problems need solutions. Right?”

She turns from you and gazes out the dining room window. You follow her eyes and see in the clear sky high over the meadow a plume from an airplane. Really, planes are everywhere. Just … everywhere. When you turn back to Ashley, she is gone. Reflexively you pat the carpet where she was sitting, and it is still damp with lake water. All that remains is the paper towel, which you pick up. It, too, is wet, and it has the rank odor of jet fuel. So, you wad it into a ball and push yourself to your feet. You know the solution to the problem and you know you have the tools. Or, to be precise, the tool. But you have no intention of taking the knife that the Dunmores left you and butchering either Hallie or Garnet so Ashley Stearns can have a playmate.

Wouldn’t that be asking too much of you—of anyone? One would think so. Yes. That is indeed what one would think.

E
mily wasn’t about to call Reseda because she hadn’t the slightest idea what she would say. She honestly wasn’t sure whether she should be indignant that this woman had kissed her on Sunday night—certainly she would be if a man had done such a thing—or whether she needed to say simply that she wasn’t interested in her in that sort of way. She loved her husband and wanted only to be friends. The last thing she needed to add to her life was some sort of harmless, playful dalliance with Reseda. Because in the end it wouldn’t be harmless. These things never were.

Besides, she didn’t believe that Reseda actually had designs on her. Emily couldn’t decide what the kiss had meant—if, in fact, it had meant anything.

She realized she had been sitting at her desk, daydreaming, for twenty minutes. Somehow it had become ten-fifteen in the morning. She was supposed to be in Franconia for a real estate closing at eleven. Quickly she rose and gathered the file on the property, a relatively new gray Colonial with four bedrooms and a pond, and reached for her coat behind the door. In the hallway on her way out, she ran into John Hardin.

“Emily,” he said, “your girls are a dream. Clary and Sage just adored them. I think they’re going to become the granddaughters Sage
still
doesn’t have!”

She nodded. She had thought so much about that Sunday night kiss that she had completely forgotten how the seniors had swarmed on her children the night before then. Somehow, that part of the weekend seemed a long, long time ago.

Y
ou pinpoint Hewitt Dunmore’s address in St. Johnsbury on Map-Quest and see you can drive there via the interstate in thirty-five minutes—assuming you don’t hit a moose. You don’t really worry about hitting a moose; you haven’t even seen one since you moved here. But those warning signs on the highway make you smile. You consider phoning Hewitt before leaving your house but in the end decide against it; you know he will try to dissuade you from coming. He may even insist that he doesn’t want to see you. But the girls—and that friend of theirs, Molly, who is joining them later today—don’t climb off the school bus until just about three in the afternoon. And it’s only a half hour and change that separates your house from Hewitt’s, so you could spend a good forty-five minutes with him before having to turn around. Assuming, of course, that he’s home. Since you haven’t called ahead, there’s no guarantee, and this may very well be a waste of an hour and a quarter.

Still, you don’t imagine that he travels all that much, and you have a sense he will be there. And when you coast to a stop on a St. Johnsbury street with the unpromising name of Almshouse Road, the modest house at the address where he lives has a tired-looking minivan—covered with end-of-winter muck, like most cars around here this time of the year—parked in the driveway. The house is a Cape in dire need of scraping and painting, and the roof looks a little ragged, but you like the remnants of red that peel from the clapboards. The color reminds you of a barn.

There isn’t a doorbell, and so you remove your glove before you rap on the wood: You expect the sound will be sharper and more likely to carry this way. Sure enough, a moment after you knock, a small man with bloodhound jowls and a gray bristle haircut opens the door, leaning heavily on a cane, and stares out at you through eyeglasses thick as a jelly jar. He is wearing a tattered cardigan the color of coral and a string tie over a blue oxford shirt. He looks like a cantankerous professor from a small, rural college. He is not what you expected, but, since he did not attend the closing on the house, you honestly weren’t sure what to expect. Emily had found him ornery on the telephone, but that’s really all you know.

“Yes?”

You extend the hand on which you are not wearing a glove. “I’m Chip Linton. My wife and I are the ones who—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” he says, taking your hand and cutting you off. “You’re the ones who bought my parents’ house.”

You note in your mind how he altered slightly how you would have finished that sentence. You would have referred to it as his house; he called it his parents’. You wonder if this distinction means anything.

“Come in, come in,” he says, his voice resigned. “No sense in standing outside in the doorway.”

He takes your coat and tosses it on a coatrack behind the front door as you untie your boots, and then he limps into the kitchen, sitting you down in a heavy wooden armchair before a mahogany table that is perfectly round and rather substantial. The chair is one of four. The appliances are old but spotless, the white on the refrigerator showing a little dark wear only around the handle. The floor has linoleum diamonds, and the cabinets look to be made of cherry.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he says, sitting across from you and folding his hands on the tabletop. In another room there is a radio playing classical music.

“Well, your parents’ house is proving to be a bit of a mystery to me,” you respond, smiling as you speak. You hadn’t planned on getting to the matter at hand quite so quickly, but he hasn’t offered you coffee or tea and has come right to the point: Why are you here?

“How so?” he says evenly.

“Well, let’s see. There are the items you left behind.”

“That old sewing machine? I told your wife to keep it. Same with the sap buckets and all them bobbins. Or you can cart ’em off to the dump. Makes no difference to me.”

“There’s a very nice brass door knocker. You could use a door knocker.”

“I heard you rapping just fine, thank you very much.”

You nod. For the first time you have gotten a real taste of his accent. When he said
fine
, you heard more than a hint of an
o
and a second syllable:
fo-ine
. “There were three other items that were real, well, UFOs.”

“Pardon?”

“Unidentified flying objects.”

“That’s right. You’re a pilot.”

“Used to be.”

“You ever see any UFOs?”

“I did not.”

“Believe in them?”

“No.”

“You should. This universe is a very strange place.”

“You know this from personal experience?”

He raises the caterpillars that pass for eyebrows. “So, your new home,” he says, ignoring your question. “I would not be surprised by anything at all my mother or my father left behind in that house. As you must know by now, my mother was nothing if not eccentric. And she was mighty ill toward the end.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Huh. I woulda thought she was still a source of gossip up in Bethel.”

“Rest assured, she isn’t.”

Outside Hewitt’s door, a town sand truck rumbles by, and the two of you sit and listen. The storm windows rattle.